Anna and Mikhail Razuvaev, artists from the Siberian city of Perm, describe their work as “Internet sublimation.” Using Flash animation, they draw funny, simple cartoons, comics, caricatures, and parodies of computer-screen “wallpaper” (http://www.goglus.com/pro/index.html). Their Internet amusements (which flirt with agreeable hooliganism) are fashioned in a coquettish, careless way, and are thus supposedly intended for comfortable domestic consumption rather than for public display. Placing great emphasis on the importance of the short, private story of “little people,” Internet art both intentionally and systematically distances itself from the big classical canon, while simultaneously engaging in an irreconcilable polemics with this very same canon. Many Internet projects therefore sarcastically take up arms against the figure par excellence of the Russian classical tradition: the national poet Alexander Pushkin.

The project of the Internet artist known by the pseudonym Yel Zelyonaya (“Green Spruce”) is playfully titled Winking Pushkin (http://www.sidor.ru/elka/pushkin/). With the click of his mouse, the user is able to alter Pushkin’s famous sideburned profile, an image regarded with ritual piety in Russian culture.